I am a have been planning to post his since we got back from the We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend that was held in Dallas, TX from January 16-18, 2009. This was an awesome event that saw over 100 developers come together over the weekend to develop web sites for 20 charities in the Dallas, TX area.

I was most proud of the representation from our region at the event. The Northwest Arkansas and Ft. Smith area send down 12 people, and the Bartlesville .NET User Group also sent a team. Our part of the world represented very well at this event.

Chris Koenig has posted a follow up that give a great overview of the event in this post.

My hope is that we will be able to organize an event like this in Northwest Arkansas this fall. With everyone that attended we should have a great base of knowledge to get it organized. If you are interested please contact me.

Thanks again to everyone that I worked with and traveled with for the event it was an awesome experience.

The regular monthly meeting of the Northwest Arkansas Chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) will be held tonight, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at the Wal-Mart campus, True North Conference Room in the David Glass Technology Center. The presentation will be:

“Back To Basics: Developing Properly Worded Requirements That Are Understood By All Stakeholders (From The First Read)", Gene Krashenin, Wal-Mart Information Solutions Division

Program cost overruns and schedule delays are attributed, in large part, to problems associated with requirements. These problems range from incomplete, inconsistent, and incomprehensible requirements to the complexities of the change management process. These problems stem from an inability to write good requirements and a lack of understanding about the importance of requirements. They are compounded by the scope, complexity, and long life cycle of major projects. Continuous education of the people involved and automation and integration of the requirements management process are needed to combat the problem.

About Gene Krashenin, CBA®:

Gene Krashenin has been practicing business analysis for the past 16 years and currently is a Senior Business Analyst at the Wal-Mart Information Solutions Division. Prior to that he spent six years as a Senior Business Analyst working primarily on new systems development and COTS implementation for the Federal Government facilitating and leading business analysis efforts on large multibillion dollars initiatives. Gene is a George Washington University certified business analyst(CBA®) holdingan MS in Nuclear Engineering and an MBA. Gene serves as a President of the Northwest Arkansas IIBA Chapter and as co-chairman of the finance subcommittee of the IIBA Chapters Council.

At the February NwaDnug meeting I presented “Introduction to Agile Software Development”. Several people requested access to the slides so I have updated my presentations page to include the slide deck (PDF format).

It was a great session and I really enjoyed everyone that made comment and help the discussion going. These are my favorite types of presentations.

Rob Tennyson also did an awesome job presenting Advanced LINQ. I always enjoy it when Rob presents and hope to see him behind the podium more.

Thanks to Zach Young for making the recording of the meeting available here.

Jason Pluenneke will present Power of the SQL GUI at the February meeting. Jason is a founding member of NWASQL and a recognized expert of all things GUI. Jason is to SQL GUI what Andrew Van Buren is to Plate Spinning...and he will share his GUI skills, GUI wisdom, and probably some GUI jokes with all!

Yesterday I started a migration project, moving a ASP NET 1.1 application to an ASP .NET 2.0/3.5 application. Ok, so there was a lot of work to be done here, due to the fact that it had also been migrated from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation Server by one our our infrastructure teams.

Well, you could say they completely unwired the whole application. I had to redo all of the assembly references but I digress. Once I got all of that working I was ready to run in debug to see if I broke anything. I was greeted by the following message “Unable to start debugging on the web server. The web server could not find the requested resource” see the image below.

Of course I instantly starting searching on the error to see how to fix it. After several failed links I found an article talking about UrlScan. I had no idea what UrlScan was or even if I had it installed.

I was able to find out that UrlScan is a security tool from Microsoft that restricts the types of HTTP requests that Internet Information Services (IIS) will process. By blocking specific HTTP requests, the UrlScan security tool helps prevent potentially harmful requests from reaching the server. To find out more about UrlScan go here.

I am not sure how this got installed on my work laptop but none the less it is there and correctly configuring UrlScan allowed my application to be debugged. So here is what I had to do to fix it.